As He Saw It
Peretz, Martin
Events enter the world, Karl Kraus used to say, as journalistic cliches. Surely the dead hand of the word is not to be doubted in our day: these cliches set the limits of all but our most...
...Reason enough to be grateful...
...There are risks such unusual men face, especially in journalism...
...Surely the dead hand of the word is not to be doubted in our day: these cliches set the limits of all but our most quixotic politics, and it is on their behalf that young men are sent off to die...
...The intermittent portrait he paints, in this context, of John Foster Dulles is simply masterful, a devastating demolition job...
...I have lapsed into a defensive posture out of a possibly erroneous anticipation of reader response...
...Others of like conviction blinded themselves to radical evil done in pursuit of the good, while yet others volte-faced into the hysterics and comforts of the newly deconvetted...
...Particularly in these terms is there no question but that those old articles, dated five or ten years ago, are still relevant...
...I wouldn't think he has ever been summoned for a private briefing, but it is precisely because Stone can percive the hole in an official story and has a healthy and unusually rare distrust of the government press release that he has been of such immense help to students and scholars simply as a source of news...
...Read now of his visit to Moscow and his inflamed passions as the Red Army tanked through the streets of Budapest...
...I think they misread him or wanted to...
...that patrimony has come to mean a distinctive brand of honest and thorough reporting and penetrating comment, and these in a decade when the craft was dishonored more than even its fiercest critics are willing to believe...
...It is for that reason and by contrast with so many of his colleagues—left and right, east and west—that I. F. Stone merits our esteem...
...Which is not to say that in clinging to the idea of progress, albeit that progress meaning something more modest than the grandiloquent promise the word once conveyed, he has made a mystique of revolution or of the revolutions of our time...
...Since shortly after the demise in 1952 of New York's Daily Compass, the second of the ill-fated lineal descendants of PM, he has been an altogether independent newspaperman, his own editor and publisher, appearing in a Weekly identified by his name...
...This book testifies to Stone's fidelity to what John Strachey once called "the great hope...
...More was included than might strictly have been required and some of the pieces were so much of the immediate moment that they hardly commend themselves even as historical curiosity...
...Some, I am certain, will refuse to recognize in Stone a person who shared their fate...
...his heroes are society's victims, of the like of Emmett Till, Owen Lattimore and Boris Pasternak...
...A goodly portion of this volume deals with the deterioration of the international situation and the intensification of the arms race...
...He cares also, however, about values and the purposes of politics, which is why he is able to place the individual incident significantly in the general frame of eventS...
...But these strictures are limited...
...ment I have read anywhere for sympathy with Castro's revolution...
...Events enter the world, Karl Kraus used to say, as journalistic cliches...
...but I think it something other than an illusion to say that the malaise is now worse, more widely diffused, and its costs greater...
...Was it, a half century ago, when the satirist of Vienna first noticed "the connection between the maltreatment of words and the maltreatment of souls and bodies...
...But the spectre which haunts the fifties is that of the strenuous ordeal of freedom...
...And there are syntactical and stylistic infelicities which one can explain only by their having been put to paper under pressure of a deadline...
...Those associated with this magazine know better than I, whose maturity post-dates Stalin's death and McCarthy's, how difficult was that stance of critical autonomy...
...Stone's style is generally lucid and crisp, and often it ascends to both elegance and eloquence...
...Stone's perspective is that of lonely dissent...
...He has not permitted his pages to serve as an intellectual pastorate for oppression...
...And Eisenbower emerges as sheer pathos itself, betrayed by his innocence and his friends...
...To the not inconsiderable number of his readers— his enterprise is a financial success...
...Predictably he is not distributed by a national syndicate and no metropolitan paper has seen fit to avail itself of his talents...
...He is too hard-headed to covet the legend of Orwell's goodness, and he has graciously preserved us from the moralizing and self-righteous feuilletons of Murray Kempton or Dwight Macdonald, to name but a few who have worked his vineyard...
...I know of no one in American journalism, at least, whose writing is less marred by dangerous cant than is his...
...In fact, one might say that it is a record of footnotes to the fifties, to that part of the era which the keepers of the conventional wisdom have self-protectively and almost systematically exorcised from memory...
...That history warrants rereading, both as regards the state of our liberty today and the rights of our fellow citizens tomorrow...
...But he is a radical with an oldfashioned faith, one we so glibly disdain, in the capacity of men to cre ate the conditions of the good life...
...This is not a volume from the pen of one who moves easily among the mighty...
...Here, there is something at once poignant and historically detached in his evolving description of our descent into national frustration...
...I want, in truth, to say this more belligerently: his journals from Havana, for example, far from uncritical but judicious and more complicated than is the view of the "futilitarians of the left," constitute the most persuasive argu...
...He is not a pundit or prophet embarrassed by contradiction, and he has the winning habit of dealing explicitly with an altered judgment...
...He has written the truth as he saw it...
...Is this a new phenomenon, or even a fresh insight...
...This book is not without the weaknesses one normally attributes to anthologies of this sort...
...and his beliefs are so authentically American that they do not bear facile comparison to the radical creeds of Europe...
...Perhaps not...
Vol. 11 • July 1964 • No. 3
